December 29 and it's 59 Degrees Outside

After breaking my leg, my friend Blair sent me a free subscription to Netflix. This has given me the opportunity to catch up on the many movies I have missed since becoming a parent. Last night Warren and I watched An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore. We had planned to see this while it was in the theaters, but somehow never made it.

I read several articles about the movie and a few interviews with Al Gore when it came out, but I was still totally unprepared for what I saw. Al Gore was charming and displayed a side of himself that the country most definitely did not see during his Presidential campaign. He is a hell of a lot smarter than I ever gave him credit for. I was amazed at the enormity of the data he provided and the first hand accounts he shared that absolutely convinced me without a shadow of a doubt that we are destroying the earth. Not only that, we are destroying it at an alarming rate. Al says that in less than 50 years, the earth as we know it will not exist unless we change our habits...our whole way of living.

Fifty years.

And that might be optimistic.

I am desperately trying not to go directly from denial to despair. It's all too easy to just give up and think that the problem is too big; that there's no answer. It makes worrying about what school to send the kids to or whether I'll ever play roller derby again seem pretty damn inconsequential. We have got to wake up and look at what is going on around us and demand change. If not for ourselves, for our children.

There is a lot we can do. First off, see the movie if you haven't seen it. Tell everyone you know to see it. Then go to climatecrisis.net and see what you can start doing now to make a difference.

It's real. Just look around.

I'm really freaked out. Warren and I have already done a number of things on the list, but we can do more. And we have to prepare the kids. First off, no more prepackaged snacks from Target. All snacks must be foraged from Overton Park.